Claire Valdez campaign staff unionizes – the first in NY this year

Socialist Assembly Member Claire Valdez has sought to portray herself as the most pro-labor candidate in the race to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez, launching her congressional campaign in January with an endorsement from the lefty United Auto Workers Region 9A. But many of the state’s most powerful labor unions – including 1199SEIU, 32BJ SEIU, DC 37, New York State United Teachers, New York State Nurses Association and the Hotel & Gaming Trades Council – as well as the state AFL-CIO have instead lined up behind her chief rival, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.

Now she’s got support from a new union: her own.

Valdez agreed to a collective bargaining agreement on Thursday with her own campaign staff, who are represented by the Campaign Workers Guild. Her campaign is the first in New York to settle a union contract so far this cycle, and it’s given her a chance to prove her support for organized labor. (A spokesperson for Reynoso said that his staffers have not expressed any interest in organizing but that he would support them if they did.)

“Collective bargaining is how workers secure their rights on the job, and I'm proud we reached this agreement so quickly,” Valdez said in a statement. “Campaigns run stronger when the people powering them are organized, secure, and fairly paid. This contract makes us better.”

On April 23, Valdez’s campaign voluntarily recognized a bargaining unit consisting of its eight staffers. The union contract was negotiated over the next three weeks, and the eight staffers ratified it on Thursday.

“We're proud to have had positive negotiations for a strong contract that raises standards for campaign workers across the country,” Valdez field coordinator Celia Wright said in a statement. “From the beginning, Claire has championed the belief that unions are for everyone and today, that belief is reflected in action. Unions for All!”

The contract, a copy of which was shared with City & State, spells out the staff’s salaries – ranging from $30 per hour for paid canvassers and $66,000 per year for a field coordinator to $108,000 per year for a political coordinator – as well as severance ($5,500 for full-time employees). 

As befits a democratic socialist campaign, the contract also specifies that trans and non-binary staffers must be referred to by their proper pronouns and includes very strong protections for immigrant staffers. The contract specifies that Valdez’s campaign will not check employees’ immigration status (beyond what is required by law) and will make every effort to refuse access to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Staffers also get up to five days of unpaid leave to deal with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proceedings and can’t be fired if they miss work because ICE detained them.

The main concession made by campaign employees is an agreement not to strike – which should help Valdez avoid following in the footsteps of former mayoral candidate Dianne Morales, whose campaign infamously imploded after her own staffers picketed her campaign office.

In the decade since the Campaign Workers Guild was founded in 2017, a handful of progressive campaigns have unionized, but the practice still isn’t that common. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign staff unionized in 2020, and Brad Lander’s campaign staff unionized in both 2021 and 2025, but Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign did not.